Blade servers (or blade PCs) represent a fast growing segment in the computing industry because of the compaction, consolidation, modularity, management, and maintenance afforded by the blade servers. In addition, the performance of blade servers, as well as other computing devices, is being increased through use of multi-core processors, which include multiple processing cores on the same die. The improvement in process technology enables ever increasing numbers of processing cores to be implemented in the computing devices.
Although multi-core processor systems have advantages over single core processor systems, users often face challenges with the multi-core processor systems. For instance, process variations may reduce the reliability of transistors, transient error rates may be high since capacitance on storage nodes is small and voltages are low, and reliability may deteriorate over time as the degradation of transistors may increase over time. These and other sources of problems may cause one or more of the processor cores to fail over time, even when the processor cores are determined to have passed factory testing.
In instances where a multi-core processor system is operated with one or more failed processor cores, the amount of processing power decreases, thereby substantially reducing the efficiency of the multi-core processor system. Typically, therefore, when a processor core fails, the entire multi-core processor system is discarded, which substantially increases the total cost of ownership of systems associated with operating systems having multiple cores. It would therefore be desirable to be able to efficiently utilize the multi-core processor system in situations where one or more of the processor cores have failed.